From Schweizerische Kreditanstalt to Credit Suisse Group: The History of a Bank

Jung, who served as Credit Suisse's institutional historian, wrote this commissioned history of the bank from its 1856 founding to the late twentieth century. The reference has not verified the book's detailed contents.

The institution's history covers a long period. Schweizerische Kreditanstalt was founded in 1856 by Alfred Escher, a Zurich politician and businessman, primarily to finance railway construction in Switzerland, which required capital that existing Swiss institutions could not supply. The bank was therefore created as an instrument of national infrastructure development, on the model of the French Credit Mobilier, and it financed the railways, the Gotthard tunnel and subsequent industrial development.

The subsequent history includes the bank's development into a universal bank, its role in Swiss industrial finance, its position through both world wars and the questions that arise about Swiss banking in that period, the postwar growth of Swiss banking on the basis of secrecy and stability, the acquisition of First Boston which gave the group an international investment banking business, the merger with Winterthur insurance, and the group's development into one of the two large Swiss banking groups.

Commissioned institutional histories written by an in-house historian have archival access that outsiders lack and an evident interest in the subject, and both affect how they should be read.

The bank's subsequent collapse and forced acquisition by UBS in 2023 is entirely outside this volume. Readers wanting that should consult recent accounts. This is a history of the institution's first century and a half, ending before the events that ended it.